SAN ANTONIO — Betty Jean Thrailkill, who worked in the North East Independent School District for more than 30 years, had a gift for teaching an age group that many of her colleagues considered the most difficult — middle school students.

“She used to say you either love working with them or you hate it,” said her daughter, Pamela Jean Thrailkill Patton. “She loved that age group.”

Thrailkill felt that children at that level were at a crossroads. She believed that “middle school was so crucial,” her daughter said. “If you could catch their problems and what they are going through at that age, you could help them change their lives.”

Thrailkill died April 21. She was 80.

She was in sixth grade when her father, an engineer, settled the family in Little Rock, Ark.

“It was during ... segregation, and her parents were ahead of their time,” Patton said. “They were open-minded about everything.”

Thrailkill learned to view everyone as equal as she saw her mother doing community work in poorer areas.

“She remembered going to a sharecropper's cabin,” her daughter said. “It was the most fun time she ever had in her life, spending the day with the sharecropper's child.”

She married the same year, moving first to Virginia then California with her husband, who was in the Marine Corps.

It was during this time she started her teaching career, and she quickly saw the importance of school counselors when she took over a class whose teacher had died.

“She saw the little children were devastated,” her daughter said. Thrailkill and her daughter moved to San Antonio in 1967 after she and her husband divorced, teaching at Kruger Middle School and helping to open Jackson Middle School.